


You've been messin' where you shouldn't have been messin'

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Google Translate abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2013-11-06
Packaged: 2017-12-31 15:47:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>If you could take back these months, pretend that you are a normal woman. Katja Obinger, 27, one of a kind. No twins in Italy, France, Austria. Blissfully ignorant.</em><br/> </p>
<p>The long-awaited Clone Club Europe epic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You've been messin' where you shouldn't have been messin'

**Author's Note:**

> Remember when I said forever ago that I was going to write a 5000-page Clone Club Europe epic? Well, that didn't happen, but here's my 5000-word epic. Please note that a lot of this involves guesswork on my part and events that are extremely unlikely to become canon. If me interpreting canon events disturbs you, go find another fic. 
> 
> With that in mind, please enjoy!

**[April 12 th]**

You wake up at 3am to the muffled sensation of your phone buzzing – across the boundary of sound and touch. It’s too early (late?) to tell which it is, and _definitely_ too early for these kinds of thoughts. Wake up, Obinger.

Anyway, your phone is buzzing. You can feel it in the base of your skull. You maybe went a little too hard last night. No, no, that is absolute fact. _Scheiße_. That phone is like a sledgehammer to the head. Too many drinks, too much dancing, too much trying to forget—

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

You fumble around on the floor, underneath the layers of old clothing. Scoop up your phone – it’s black, silent.

Oh. Other one then.

_Scheiße!_

You’re a lot more awake as you scoop up the pink phone – awake enough to close your eyes when you grab it, so that the bright screen doesn’t blind you. The image lights up the back of your eyelids like a distant sun. When you open your eyes, you see your screen flooded with notifications.

[Missed call:  
 Danielle Fournier]

[Missed call:  
 Danielle Fournier]

[Missed call:  
 Danielle Fournier]

[Danielle Fournier]

Katja pick up your phone

[Danielle Fournier]

Katja

[Danielle Fournier]

Katja please

Your fingers aren’t steady on the keys. Last night’s drinks are stirring in your gut with something deeper, more primal. Something is wrong.

[Katja Obinger]

Wiats wqnng

Your phone lights up again, hovers on the edge of ringing. You press answer hurriedly, and Danielle’s voice comes bubbling over the line. She’s speaking in French. Your heartbeat spikes. You all agreed to speak in English. You’d said it was best, for when you all got together, when all of you joined up. The details were fuzzy, but someday, someday.

You hear your name, on the tailend of some hysterical wave of speech.

“ _Katja c'est votre faute ils savent où nous sommes –_ ”

“Danielle!” you bark at her. “ _lent…s’il…vous…plait_.” The French is heavy in your mouth, but it gets the point across. For a few seconds, all you hear is quick, panting breaths.

“Aryanna was not picking up her phone,” she says, her voice throaty and stilted, thick with tears. “I-I looked in Rome news, to see if there was some sort of…ah…natural disaster, and…”

Her voice trails off.

“And?” you reply, staring fixedly at the wall. “ _And?_ ”

“Aryanna,” she says carefully, “is dead.”

“ _Was?_ ” you roar, forgetting the pounding in your head. You drop the phone in shock and curl in on yourself. You stifle a shriek by biting your fist as your head pound pound pounds. Aryanna is dead. Aryanna is dead.

Danielle’s voice is tinny on the phone, where you dropped it. You pick it back up, run your hand through your hair.

“Dead?” you croak.

“ _Oui, oui_ ,” she says. “She was…she was…shot. In the head. Right outside her…” she trails off, sobs desperately into the microphone. From here it just sounds like a hiccup of static. You stand up, pace in pointless circles around the room, kicking up fur coats and endless leopard-print as you go.

“Right outside her home,” Danielle finishes.

“ _Hurensohn_ ,” you say, your free hand spiraling in the air. It’s shaking. Your whole body is shaking. Aryanna is dead.  

“Katja, listen,” the French woman continues desperately. “I think it is related to…us.”

“How?” you answer. “How is this?”

She pauses, breathes, swallows. “The news…they were very excited. When they followed the,” a hysterical sob, “killer’s tracks, they found an…ah…nest. With drawings on the wall. Quotes from the Bible. And…blood.”

“Whose blood?” you croak.

“Aryanna’s,” she whispers into the phone. “They said it was Aryanna’s blood.”

You sit back down on your bed. It’s still warm. _Gott_ , if you could just crawl back in, pretend this never happened, wake up and blame it on your hangover. If you could take back these months, pretend that you are a normal woman. Katja Obinger, 27, one of a kind. No twins in Italy, France, Austria. Blissfully ignorant.

“It was painted on the wall,” Danielle chokes. “Like, like, like…finger paints. In a message.”

“Tell me the message, Danielle,” you whisper soundlessly into the phone.

“All of the abominations,” she says, “will die.”

Your name is Katja Obinger. It is 3:14am on April 12th, 2012.

You are a dead woman walking.

**[January 2 nd]**

It takes Adele a while to slip up. But she does, eventually.

She comes back in to your apartment in the middle of the night in a wave of antiseptic. You blink awake, sleepy and disoriented, to see her take down her hair from a tight bun ( _so unlike Adele_ , you’d thought), shake her head, sigh to herself. Look at you. In the dark you can’t read her face.

She pads soundlessly over to you, her head tilted thoughtfully, and murmurs something to herself in unaccented English.

That frightens you more than anything. You’d thought she was German, like you. The two of you were learning English together.

“What did you say?” you croak sleepily in German. She jumps.

“Nothing, sleepyhead,” she coos at you, patching the cracks in her voice with an easy laugh. (Her voice shakes.) “Go back to slumberland. Sleep off all the booze.”

But you’re fully awake now. Your mind is buzzing. She lied to you. She is lying _right now_. How much of her is a lie?

You roll over, pull the blankets over your head, and lie there with your eyes wide open in the dark. Eventually the apartment settles down to relative quiet again. You hear a sigh and creak as she dips down onto the mattress. Minutes pass – you count your breaths, wait for hers to even out. There.

You get out of bed. Shrug on a coat from the floor. Creep to her laptop, sitting closed where she placed it on the table near the door.

When you open it, the light is blinding. Your eyes water. When you blink your vision back to normal you are confronted by a screen demanding a password.

_Passwort1_ , you type in cautiously on the keyboard, and hit enter.

The desktop loads.

(She was always bad at computers, your Adele. Comforting to know some things are true.)

You don’t even know what you’re looking for. A contract for some television show, maybe, or an email from a friend. _I bet you can’t convince a German that you’re German, Adele_. Something that the two of you can laugh off later. Something that would prove that she is still yours.

You move through her documents, carefully at first and then more quickly. Old work from college, photos from trips the two of you had made together, endless debris from her life. This doesn’t comfort you. Instead your heart just beats faster, faster—

_Geben Passwort Zugriff auf die Datei._

You try _Passwort1_ again, although you’re not hopeful.

_Versuchen Sie es erneut._

On a narcissistic whim you type _Katja_.

_Versuchen Sie es erneut._

You type in _Katja_ again. Slowly, you add _84_.

A row of files spreads itself against the screen, neatly labeled in English.

“ _Scheißkerl_ ,” you murmur, like a prayer, and you shakily open Google Translate in another tab.

When you are finished, you have:

_Reports_  
Medical data  
Others

You stand up from the table, fast. Your head rushes. You want to pace, but you can’t wake Adele up. You definitely _cannot_ wake Adele up, not now. So you stand there for a moment, shaking and indecisive, before slowly moving back to the glowing screen. It’s like confronting a wild animal. You click _Subject_ first and it opens up a dizzying list of documents. They’re labeled with dates. The first one is the day you met.

You open it. Paste it into the waiting window.

_Approached subject under guise of compliment on hair. Positive response from subject, response used to further ingratiate self. Promised to get coffee together later. Results promising._

You taste bile in the back of your throat. _Gott_ , you remember that day. You remember Adele approaching you, joking with you that she couldn’t pull your hair off. You were still unsure about it. It felt good, to hear that you had made the right choice. Yes, you were a little desperate for a friend, but that didn’t mean that you were willing to be a part in an _experiment_.

_Are you sure?_ A little voice whispers in the back of your mind. _Are you sure it wasn’t worth it?_

“Stop,” you mutter to yourself. Then you feel foolish. You click on a later date.

_Subject increasingly friendly. After several loaded hints about being out on the street, subject offered her apartment as a place to stay. Fascinating opportunity to see living habits of subject and how they differ from others_.

You close that one quickly and think _others_. You open the other file and read _Janika Zingler, Austria_. _Aryanna Giordano, Italy. Danielle Fournier, France. Elizabeth Childs, Canada_.

Other women, like you. Women who have been betrayed by people close to them. You fumble for a pen in the dark and hurriedly scrawl down _Janika Zingler_ on an old concert flyer. Numb, you close the windows and shut down Adele’s laptop.

You can still hear her breathing in the dark as you blindly move towards your own laptop. This time you shut your eyes as it opens. You move to Google, type in the woman’s name. You don’t know what you’re going to do. Warn her, maybe? _You don’t know me, but someone in your life is spying on you. You can’t trust anyone. I’m sorry._ What a stupid, stupid thing to say. You stare at the blinking cursor for a second and then slowly press _Enter_.

Your own face stares at you from the screen.

_Scheiße_.

**[February 3 rd]**

“We need to know what we are to each other,” Aryanna says. Her face is a pale smear on your screen, her eyes two dark holes.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” snaps Janika. She’s pacing back and forth in her corner of the screen. Her window looks like a cage, and from the way she’s pacing she’ll break out of it soon. Climb through your screen. Lean in close, poke you in the face, and say—

“Katja’s out of it again. Katja!”

“ _Entschuldigung_ ,” you mutter. You run your hands through your hair. It’s been a long month. “What we are to each other?”

“You can’t believe we’re siblings, that’s stupid,” Janika continues. “The odds are…um…um…impossible.”

Danielle pipes up. “It’s not as…impossible…as any of our other options,” she says, shrugging eloquently.

Your first thought had been doppelgangers, like all of the old stories. But that’s ridiculous. The women certainly don’t seem malicious. Besides, none of you are dead yet. It’s been a month. Surely curses don’t take that long to work.

“What about clones?” Aryanna asks, a smile tugging at the edge of her mouth.

_Clones_. What about clones? You’re all silent for a moment, rolling the thought around in your minds. Aryanna’s smile fades.

“No, no, I was not serious,” she says.

“What if we _were_ clones?” you continue, leaning in closer to the screen. You catch your reflection in the corner of your eye. Your hair is so bright and your face is so pale…you look demonic. Maybe you are going to bring bad luck down on them, after all. “It makes more sense than identical babies separated at birth.”

“More sense than _doppelgangers_ ,” Janika sneers. You can’t tell, but it looks like she’s eyeing you. A challenge.

“How would we go about proving such a thing?” Danielle asks.

“We could test our blood.” You’re already treating this _clone_ idea like truth, but – why not? What have you to lose? “If we are actually…identical, we would have the same blood, _ja_? Same…everything.”

“I am not sure I want to give anyone my blood,” the French woman says, voice high and fluttery.

You’ve gotten Janika’s attention, though. “Who do we send it to? _You?_ ”

You hadn’t actually gotten that far. “ _Ich nehme an_ ,” you say, shrugging wildly. Why not? You certainly have the funds.

“We don’t all speak German, Katja,” says Aryanna.

“I will do it,” you say. “I can get a postbox in Berlin. Send the samples there.”

“So Katja’s going to be clone _Hauptsitz_?” Janika says, grinning. “Maybe we should send everything to her, then.”

“Everything,” you say dumbly.

“Blood samples. Hair samples. Documentation. Proof that we are real girls.”

Danielle shakes her head wildly, curly hair obscuring her chat window entirely. “ _Non, non, non_ ,” she says through tears. “This is already enough of a risk. What if someone finds this information, follows it back to us?”

“Katja would be careful. Won’t you, Katja?” Aryanna’s voice trembles on the last word, pleading. _Won’t you, Katja?_

“ _Ja, ja,_ of _course_ I will be careful.”

“ _Per favore_ , Danielle. You know we would not ask this of you if it was not necessary.”

You’re all looking to your respective screen corners in silence. Waiting.

Danielle lets out a gusty sigh, mutters something in French. “I will do it. But I do not like it.”

Janika cackles. “That doesn’t matter,” she says. “That doesn’t matter at all.”

**[September 27 th]**

You cough blood for the first time three days after Danielle’s death.

As you stare blankly at the red spots on your hand, all you can think about is the killer and Jesus metaphors.

It’s funny, isn’t it. All you have left of Danielle (and Janika and Aryanna) is you. Your face in the mirror. Your voice. Sometimes you mutter to yourself in poor attempts at Italian and French, in an attempt to conjure them up.

Maybe the blood is Danielle trying to force her way back.

_Or maybe you’re just crazy, Obinger_ , you think as you wipe the blood on a handkerchief. You move on through the train station, packed with murmuring crowds. You’ve been on the move a lot over the last few months. At first you’d been heading towards Austria, then France. Now you’re just moving blindly in circles. You feel like the weak animal in the herd, pursued by wolves.

But you’re alive. That’s more than you can say for your sisters.

(“I’m not going anywhere,” Janika said over the phone. Her tone was curt, sharp. “If that son of a bitch wants to come and kill me he’ll meet the business end of my knife.”

“Please, Janika,” you pleaded. “We don’t know if he’s going to come after one of us at all, but if he does you and Danielle are closest. Danielle already moved to her parents’ house.”

“How do you know that won’t put her in more danger?!” she hissed, then paused. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m not going to run from anything.”

Dial tone.)

You still have the briefcase, after all of this. Somehow you’ve managed to get it through different borders, planes and trains. You don’t even know what you’re holding onto it for. Maybe it’s the truth behind your sentimentality – you may feel like your blood is all you have left of them, but this blood truly _is_. Everything these women were is in your shaking fist. Everything they had the potential to be.

A woman bumps into you, mutters, “ _Entschuldigung!_ ” You mutter it back, even as you move away from her as quickly as possible. Can’t trust anyone, anymore. Even the strangers on the street may be trying to kill you.

You look at the blood in your hand and fumble for your phone. Press speed-dial 4.

“Yeah?” says a woman’s voice on the other end of the line, crackling with annoyance and the static of long distances.

“Beth,” you say, and say again when your voice makes no sound, “I need your help.”

**[May 18 th]**

You pace back and forth as the phone rings against your ear. Ring. Ring. Ring.

(“I keep seeing a shape in the crowd behind me,” Danielle hissed. You couldn’t see her that well on your computer screen, especially since she kept turning to look over her shoulder. “This tall man, with black hair, watching me…” She wrung her hands together nervously. “I don’t think I’m going to stay here anymore.”

“Where are you going to go?” you asked. Selfishly you hoped she wasn’t going to come to Germany. Either it was unfounded paranoia, which would give you a jumpy and unwelcome housemate, or it was real. In which case you would both be killed.

“I’m going to my parent’s house, in Paris,” she said. Sighed. “I will be careful about it. But I do not think I have much time before that man…” She made a gesture with her hands, too quick for you to make out over the screen, before her butterfly hands alighted on her face to wipe tears from her eyes. She hunched over on the screen.

“Be safe,” you told her, urgency coloring your voice. Unsaid is _there are only four of us now, and one of us lives far away. You are all I have now. Please don’t go_.

She choked on the edge of a hysterical laugh. “Of course I will be safe,” she said, smile twitching at the edge of her mouth. “I will be safe, or I will be dead.”

She shut off her end. You felt no more reassured.)

The ringing stops. You hear shuffling as the person on the other end of the line adjusts their receiver.

“Detective Elizabeth Childs,” a voice says, sounding unamused.

You clear your throat. “Detective Childs, I need to talk to you about something important. Can I speak to you alone?”

A pause. “Shit, are you calling from _Germany_? Are you German? Don’t you have police over there?”

(Well, at least you have her attention.)

“Please,” you croak.

“Alright, alright, let me just switch you over.”

When she murmurs confirmation, you give her the speech. You’ve given it before. It’s not difficult.

What’s more difficult is what follows.

“Clones,” the detective says shakily. “ _Clones_. You really expect me to believe – fucking _clones_. You do realize that is _impossible_.”

“I am sorry, Elizabeth,” you say carefully.

“Beth,” she interjects. “Beth. I’m not a queen or anything.” You hear the huff of her hysterical laughter into the phone, a muffled “ _clones_.”

“Beth,” you say again, “I called because I need your help. _We_ need your help.”

You can hear the rustle of movement. Is she pacing? Do you all share that? _Focus_ , Obinger.

“Germany _does_ have police, right?” she asks. “That didn’t stop happening, did it?”

“Someone is killing us off,” you blurt into the microphone, then hurriedly clap your free hand over your mouth. _Scheiße_. Too soon! You’ve lost her for sure, and you’re all ruined—

“You’re saying you’re being hunted,” Beth says on the other end of the line, from all the way across the ocean. Her voice is calm and steady. If you’d know this was going to help her pull herself together you would have mentioned it earlier.

“ _Ja_ ,” you say roughly. “There is a…man following us. He has already killed Aryanna.”

“Aryanna?” she responds. “How many of you are there exactly?”

“I know of five, counting you.” You pause. “Four, now.”

She hisses curse words into the receiver. “How the hell am I supposed to believe you?”

You’d talked with the others about this, decided it was a calculated risk. “I can send you my birth certificate, Beth. But…”

“Okay, okay, I’ll see if there’s anything I can do,” the detective tells you. She sighs. “I’ll try some facial recognition shit, see if there’s any more of us here in good ol’ North America. Maybe one of them is like a…good assassin or something. Maybe they’ll duke it out.” She laughs with a tinge of hysteria again. You missed laughter. It’s been a while since any of you could joke about this.

“Thank you,” you say softly into the microphone. “Thank you, Beth.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the detective says. “But if that birth certificate is fake or something I’m reporting you to the German police.”

“ _In Ordnung_ ,” you say softly.

“And Katja?”

“ _Ja?_ ”

“It’s going to be okay.”

She hangs up.  (You want to believe her.)

**[July 15 th]**

You haven’t heard from Janika in three days.

You know why. You’ve been putting it off.

(She was the first one you reached out to. She was stubborn and stupid and now she is _was_ , forever past tense.)

Opening your laptop always feels like putting a gun to your head. There’s never anything good to come of it.

_Janika Zingler_ , you type. Press enter.

_Woman found stabbed to death in her apartment_ , blares the first result.

You slam your laptop down. _Scheiß-Scheiße._ You cradle your head in your hands, run your fingers through the hair Adele was so admiring of…back when times were simpler. Back when you could trust that a woman walking up to you on the street wasn’t a part of a massive conspiracy that aims to see you dead.

Denial won’t change anything, though, and you’d hate to be moping when the killer finds you. You open your laptop back up.

_28-year-old woman found stabbed to death in her apartment identified as Janika Zingler. Police investigating the scene noted signs of a struggle. The victim was holding a blade covered in blood, indicating some resistance. The apartment was broken into. Police suspect a robbery gone wrong, but the motive in the stabbing is currently unknown. Anyone with information about the break-in is urged to call their local police station._

_Miss Zingler is not survived by any close relatives._

_She is,_ you want to yell at the computer. _She has us_. But that would be foolishness beyond foolishness. There’s nothing you could prove by going to Austria, anyway. It’s too late to stand by Janika now.

You reach for the phone, let your finger hover over speed dial 2. Then speed dial 4.

No, you can’t do it. You can’t be the bearer of more _gottverdammte_ bad news. Danielle will figure it out – maybe she already has. Maybe she’s suffering the same crisis as you, tucked away in her childhood bedroom in Paris. Right now she could be looking out the window and thinking, _remember when times were simpler?_

(These days you don’t know how much of you is _you_ and how much is bits and pieces of these other women. You are a kaleidoscope, each shake a different person.)

And you can’t talk to Beth right now. She’s busy with her own group in North America (called them “Clone Club,” bit back a laugh), figuring out their own history. Learning each other the way you in Europe did months and months ago.

You’re alone on this.

You skim the article again, looking for any sort of clue. Blood on the blade – oh. That could be something. If Janika were still alive you could ask her to check on the blood. But of course she’s not. Paradox.

You could head out to Austria yourself. You’ve been hopping hotel rooms in Germany, staying on the move…it wouldn’t be too hard to nudge yourself over the border a little bit. Snatch the blade before the police get their hands on it, and...what? What, Obinger? There’s no one you could bring it to. Best to let the police do their job, and keep moving.

You close your laptop mechanically and check your phone. It’s 11:40. Checkout is at 12:00.

You give yourself five minutes to grieve. Then you grab the briefcase and keep moving.

**[January 5 th]**

The woman eyes you on the other side of the monitor with unblinking fascination. Occasionally she moves her head from side to side like a snake charmer, or like she’s waiting for you to move too. Finally she leans back.

“You’re right, we’re identical,” she says. “Looks like you even have that dry patch of skin between your eyebrows. _Verrückt!_ ”

You’re about to respond when your phone starts buzzing. You jump a foot in the air like a startled cat, and your copy (Janika, you remind yourself) snorts with amusement before leaping off-camera for a moment.

You pick up your phone. Adele’s calling. You cancel it, throw your phone to the other end of your cheap hotel room.

(You had enough funds to get the room, but who’s to say Adele wouldn’t follow you? You need to stay moving. Maybe get out of Germany entirely. You rationalized this to yourself as you picked up your phone, dialing the number for home by rote. Secretly you were thinking, _Mutter, Vater_ , _help. Help me._ But what could they do?

They agreed to sponsor your trip “to find yourself,” cautioned you to stay safe, said they’d have a card to you in a week. You spent the rest of the day in your hotel room, sobbing.)

“Ex?” Janika calls to you as she sits back down. She’s holding a bottle of something you can’t see, and when she swigs the column of her throat is long and lean.

“ _Nein_ ,” you say, startled. “ _Nein!_ ”

“Are you thinking it is none of my business?” your double asks. “Thinking, _why does this woman want to know so much about my life_?”

She leans in closer to the screen. Her breath probably stinks. “ _You’re wrong_ ,” she hisses. “It is my business. We are each other’s business now.”

Smoothly, she sits back. “After all,” she says, grinning, “we’re family.”

Later, you pick up your phone. You should probably leave it behind, but you are a sentimental creature. You scan your recent alerts while fiddling with the flash drive of data you took from Adele’s computer. Like a rabbit’s foot.

[Missed call:  
 Adele]

[Missed call:  
 Adele]

 [Adele]

katja where u at

[Adele]

wtf is all ur stuff gone

[Adele]

thats why the fuck not what the fuck

[Adele]

u better get ur ass back fast u pay half the rent here u know

It must take a lot to keep up the charade when you are a professional. That earns no sympathy from you, though. You delete the messages. Turn your phone off.

You should probably get another phone for…this business, though. Something cheap, burnable, distinguishable. You’ll figure it out.

Eventually, Adele stops calling.

**[January 2 nd]**

_What am I going to do, Katja?_

**[October 9 th]**

You arrive in the airport alone, which only vaguely surprises you. Beth had sounded rattled on the phone. She’d long ago lost the easy humor of her first conversation. Being a part of this had weighed heavier on her ( _and she didn’t even know any of ones who died_ , a voice snaps in the back of your head. _All of hers are still alive._ ) than you’d expected, heavier even than it had weighed on you. You hadn’t even guessed.

Moving through an airport is routine by now, and you complete the gestures with mechanical ease. Get the briefcase. Get your suitcase. If your parents had known the truth about the trip they were sponsoring, they probably wouldn’t have opened their coffers to you. Or maybe they would have. They’d never much cared for Adele, never trusted her. They’re probably relieved she’s gone – even if it’s because she was spying on you and performing medical examinations while you were sleeping. They’d probably be less relieved about the killer…hopefully you’ve left that man behind. That woman. You know so little.

(“The mystery thickens in what appeared to be a break-and-enter gone wrong,” the television blared in another identical hotel room. “Tests run on the blade reveal that the blood on it was Ms. Zingler’s own, yet she shows no visible stab wounds besides the one that killed her—”

You shut the television off with shaking fingers and sat down. What if you’d all miscalculated? What if the assassin wasn’t some hulking man with dark hair, some professional hitman? What if the killer was one of _you_?

Or he just put the blade back in Janika’s hand and took his own, to throw the cops off of his scent. He’s smart. You all know that.

You had to believe it wasn’t one of you. If you think otherwise Danielle died for nothing. If you think otherwise there is yet another _ficken_ conspiracy for you to work through.)

You call Beth once you’ve gotten everything, juggling the briefcase and your suitcase and your phone with no finesse.

It goes straight to voicemail – generic. You hadn’t wanted to leave any signs of who was using the phone, after all.

That means you can’t leave a voicemail, either. You text instead.

[Katja Obinger]

Have arrived

With a wracking cough, you lose more blood to your handkerchief. _Scheiß-Scheiße. Scheiße!_ Beth had _promised_ to get her “scientist friend” to help you, said that you could get a cure. But she’s been losing it. If she forgot you are going to _kill_ her.

In the meantime: keep moving. Stay cautious. Maybe you’ll look into one of the other clones while you’re here – you have her address in the briefcase. _Alison Hendrix_. Another spin of the genetic wheel.

(Maybe she’ll have Aryanna’s smile, or Janika’s laugh, or—)

**[January 7 th]**

You look at yourself in the mirror. You are pale and shaking and you can see the traces of Danielle around your mouth and eyes. Maybe video calling was a mistake, but it was the only way you could prove yourself. Prove that you are she, that she is you.

“My name is Katja Obinger,” you whisper to the mirror. “I am 27 years old. I am one of a kind.”

You look like a dead woman walking.

**[November 25 th]**

_Sie ist nicht Beth. Ihr seid alle verloren._

**Author's Note:**

> You've been messin' where you shouldn't have been a messin'  
> and now someone else is gettin' all your best.  
> These boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do  
> one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.  
> \-- "These Boots Were Made For Walking," Nancy Sinatra
> 
> Questions? Concerns? Critiques? Comments? Did I mess any of the German up? Did I completely mess up a canon date? Please let me know in the comments! Thanks so much for reading!


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